Chapter 8: Future Planning and Daylilies
This time, they had caught several hundred catties of fish. The men who had come to help strung the fish through the gills on wicker branches and carried them on their backs.
When they arrived at the cave entrance, Chen Jian looked toward the semi-wild wolves in the distance, whistled, and threw a few fish over to see if they would take the offering.
Unfortunately, the wolves were still timid. They waited until everyone had entered the cave before dashing out to snatch the fish and disappear.
The cave was filled with a fishy odor, but to the clansmen, it was the smell of happiness.
Chen Jian looked at the huge pile of fish, contemplating how to preserve them.
The tribe had no salt, which was a major problem. Without it, there was no way to store the fish for long.
Looking at the sunset, he guessed that tomorrow would be another fine day. They could dry the fish, but unsalted dried fish would surely have a pungent smell.
The old grandmother was not picky about such things. She smiled at the day's harvest and used a piece of charcoal to draw a second mural on the cave's stone wall: a black-and-white bear teaching the tribe how to weave nets and then use them to catch fish.
Chen Jian smiled at the mural.
The tribe already had fire, so he couldn't claim the title of Suiren, the mythical discoverer of fire. But if his tribe were to integrate into the wider civilization of this region in the future, how could he earn a place in their mythology?
The other tribes nearby were all distant relatives from a hundred years ago. He wondered if any clans who had migrated elsewhere had developed a different civilization.
Inside the cave, women sat by the fire, weaving simple fiber cloth, while men were fletching arrows, using pine resin as glue.
Chen Jian approached the old grandmother, wanting to ask about the other tribes.
She explained that every year, at the cusp of spring and summer, the tribe traveled to a high mountain. Several tribes gathered there to communicate—though the main purpose was to ensure the reproduction of each tribe. Occasionally, tribes from further away would pass through.
According to the old grandmother, there were lickable stones and salty soil at that gathering place.
There were about a dozen tribes in the vicinity, all of similar size, though a few had smaller populations than their own. As for exact numbers, the old grandmother, who still used knotted ropes to keep records, couldn't give a precise answer.
These tribes were all at a similar stage of development. Each group's activities were confined to a range of tens of kilometers, and it seemed none of them practiced primitive agriculture or animal husbandry.
Whether there were tribes thousands of miles away that had already begun farming was anyone's guess.
Recalling the route from yesterday's hunt, Chen Jian used charcoal to sketch a simple map on the ground.
He tentatively assumed the direction of the sunrise was east. At the foot of their cave was a small river, more than ten meters wide, that flowed eastward.
The large river where they had hunted yesterday flowed to the southeast.
They were in a temperate zone with four distinct seasons. The vegetation was dominated by broad-leaved forests, and the land seemed quite fertile.
The animals he had seen so far included leopards, deer, goats, wild boars, wolves, and civet cats. The fish in the rivers included carp, grass carp, and some smaller species he couldn't name.
The main edible plant they gathered was an unknown type of tuber, supplemented with acorns and wild fruits. The difference in species distribution made Chen Jian unsure what their future staple food might be. Perhaps, as in his past life, it would be corn, but it was also possible he could find original strains of corn or potatoes.
Even finding them would not be easy. Those original staple plants would still be in their wild state—wheat that looked like foxtail grass, corn with only six or seven kernels, soybeans that grew as tall as a person with vine-like tendrils...
The environment here was humid, meaning plants didn't need to put all their nutrients into fruit and reproduction like in some arid regions. It would be difficult to find original crops with large, full ears.
"Domestication, fishing and hunting, farming..."
Chen Jian wrote three concepts on the ground with charcoal, muttering about the three pillars that would ensure the tribe's survival. To establish male dominance, private ownership, tribal alliances, and eventually civilization, they had to master these three things.
A tribe that worried about what it would eat tomorrow had no time to think about culture.
For now, fishing and domestication seemed the easiest paths, but farming was the true cornerstone of civilization. He didn't want to be remembered in a thousand years as the ancestor of tribesmen who wore salmon-skin armor or merely herded livestock.
Cultivating crops took time. Wheat, for example, was a genetically mutated hexaploid plant with three times more DNA than its ancestors. It would take about a thousand years to appear naturally, and only then through a series of chance coincidences.
But he could take a shortcut. If necessary, he could extract colchicine from the roots of daylilies, soak the seed buds to induce polyploid mutations, and then use artificial selection. He had to force them into the agricultural era in a short time.
Fortunately, the fishing method and bow he had introduced could ensure the tribe didn't have to hunt daily. Real fishing nets would appear soon.
Having figured this out, he recalled that he had definitely seen daylily plants. He firmly erased the words for domestication and fishing. Not because they were useless, but because they would be supplements to farming, not the foundation.
With his plan settled, he resolved to take a few days, once they had stored enough food, to travel down the river. He needed to map the nearby terrain and search for usable primitive crops. This was essential for future development.
No matter what the geography and species of this world were, whether it was corn, potatoes, wheat, buckwheat, beans, rice, or millet... as long as he could find something to plant, they would have a future. Otherwise, it was still a dead end.
In addition, he had to find large livestock like cattle and horses. He recalled how the Central American civilizations of his previous life had developed agriculture, but without large draft animals—their largest domesticated creature being the alpaca—their progress had stagnated for thousands of years.
And then there was salt! Salt! Salt!
The old grandmother had mentioned a saline-alkali land at the meeting place, which meant there might be salt ponds nearby. He had to occupy that land. Only the tribe that controlled the salt could become the leader of a tribal alliance, and it could grow powerful within a few years.
The strength of the nearby tribes was similar to their own, so he would first have to annex a few of the smaller ones. With the advent of fishing nets and bows, the tribe's population limit could be raised. As for how to annex them, Chen Jian already had several ideas, but he needed to observe the situation first.
He asked when the tribal exchange took place. The old grandmother said it would be when the apricots were ripe, which was about half a month away.
While he was thinking, Yu Qian'er brought over two grilled fish, one for the old grandmother and one for him.
To Chen Jian's surprise, Yu Qian'er was very smart. It was only her limited exposure to new things that kept her thinking at a tribal level.
"Brother, eat fish."
Her face was still smudged with dust, but her calves and arms were much cleaner from wading in the river to catch fish.
Chen Jian took the fish and asked her with a smile if she remembered the three numbers from last night.
Yu Qian'er nodded happily and told him there had been three chicks. She found a piece of charcoal, wrote a '3' on the ground, and crookedly drew a chick beside it.
The old grandmother came over to look. She thought this method was excellent—if you drew a picture on a stone, everyone would know what it meant. She then drew a fish next to another mark.
Bird and fish became the first two written characters of the tribe. Chen Jian drew another symbol for a bow, then added pictographs for the sun, moon, water, mountain, and so on, calling the young people and children of the tribe to come over.
He patiently explained what each symbol was. Fortunately, they were pictographic and represented common things.
Except for 'bow' and 'arrow,' the pronunciations were from the original tribal language, making them easy to remember. The simple strokes of the characters were rounded, a natural result of being drawn on the ground with charcoal rather than carved into bamboo with a knife, which would have produced sharp angles.
He tasked his younger sister, Yu Qian'er, with teaching the children how to recognize the numbers. If every child was as smart as she was, they would learn within a month.
As for the numbers after three, he decided to devise a system where the easiest-to-understand symbols took priority.
Four would be four horizontal lines. Five would be a mountain shape, like an open palm or a triangle without a base. Six would resemble its modern character (六), but with the top point becoming a vertical line and the two lower dots removed. Ten would be an 'X'.
The decimal system was inevitable, not just because future generations used it, but because people have ten fingers, making it easy to understand. He couldn't expect them to grasp a concept like zero yet; if he could get all the clansmen to count to ten, it would be a proud achievement.
As for octal or hexadecimal systems, those were better for measurement but not as intuitive for children learning to count.
It was like a rope. If you defined it as one meter, dividing it into ten equal parts was difficult in this era. Even Chen Jian had to think for a moment to figure out a reliable method.
It was far easier to divide things by powers of two. Fold the rope once to get a half, fold it again for a quarter, again for an eighth, and so on. It was the same with weight; using a simple balance with a stick and sandbags, it was easiest to divide things in half. There was a reason these systems had developed.
Civilization... was truly not built overnight.
He looked at the busy clansmen, at the children repeating "one, two, three" in awkward, trembling voices. He looked at the aunts weaving, who hadn't thought to use a stick to separate the warp threads, which would allow a shuttle to pass through easily. He looked at the uncles who hadn't thought to add bone needles or animal teeth to the tips of their arrows to increase their power. Chen Jian felt that the road ahead was long.
"Let's see how long it takes them to figure these things out."
He sighed deeply. The thoughts of one person are not a civilization. The thoughts of a group of people—that is civilization.